Decisions
by CardioQueen
Summary: Post 3.13. Bang.


_Everyday we have to make decisions. They could be as simple as whether or not we hit the snooze button. They can be more complex decisions- answers that carry connotations as heavy as lifetime commitments. Or they could be life and death decisions. Decisions we have to make so quickly, that we don't realize the gravity of our actions until it's too late. Everyday we make decisions that could change the course of our lives for the better or for the worse, and we have to live with those decisions, we have to live with the consequences of those decisions. The challenge with decisions however isn't making one, it's making the right one._

The crowd grew around the OR board, mumbles of a team trapped inside, compromised in some way and the rumor spread rampant through the hospital. Phones rang on the various units non-stop, whispers became rumbles of ominous bearings that caught wind of Preston Burke's ears.

He approached the board with growing dread when he didn't see Cristina excitedly hurrying around the cluster of people at the board, when he didn't see the woman he loved trying to figure out how to get in on this new 'cool' occurence.

"Shepherd, what's going on?" He parted the crowd, towering over most of the OR nurses and staff members.

"There's an isoflurane leak in OR3 with Addison's team." Derek sighed, running his hands over his head, "There's a hazmat team on the way, but they're about 20 minutes out."

"Who's in there?" Burke questioned, his blood running cold through his veins.

"Addison, Richard, Bailey.." His voice trailed off.

"Who's the intern?"

Derek remained silent, confirming his worst fears.

"Who is the intern on the case, Shepherd?" He barked at him, his airway constricting, he could barely get the words out.

"Meredith and Cristina scrubbed in on the case." Derek exhaled.

Burke pushed past him, pulling his scrub cap from his pocket and pulling it on his head, his mind set on only one thing.

"Burke! Burke! Get back here! You can't go in there! You'll go down with the rest of them."

But he did not heed his warnings as he pushed through the crowd of people, quickening his pace as he came to OR 3 to find Mark standing in the scrub room watching the patient on the table, still intubated, writhing in panic.

"Dr. Burke..." He looked up, "Is the hazmat team here?"

Burke did not answer him, but scanned the room carefully for Cristina, grasping at surgical masks blindly, pulling out three of them and tying them on.

"You're going in there? You can't go in there, you'll go down too. Isoflurance is fast, Burke." Mark scoffed, "You'll be on the floor before you make it 3 feet into the room."

He tied the masks over his face, and found Cristina just to the head of the table, where the patient lay.

Before Cristina there might have been a choice that he had to make, there might of been something in his conscience that told him to save the patient, that the patient was first.

In this moment though, he was not a surgeon, but a desperate man who could lose the woman who meant the world to him.

The woman who'd stuck by him through deceit and silent treatment and harsh and cold comments.

There was no choice.

He took one last deep breath and held it tightly, pressing his lips hard together as he burst into the OR, stepping over Bailey and Meredith to Cristina and he bet to scoop her in his arms.

The sound of the patient gagging on the tube pulled at his soul as turned his back to her, his heart heavy, his mind swirling from the lack of oxygen, his heart pumping harder because he knew that Cristina was barely breathing.

He pushed the door open and gasped for air through his surgical mask as Mark met him to try and pull Cristina from his arms but he turned away from him, running from the scrub room down the hall to the recovery room.

"Cristina, baby...wake up." He called to her through his surgical masks.

Her arm fell limply towards the ground as he rounded the corner into recovery and laid her out on a gurney. Her lips were pale and her breaths shallow as he pulled her shirt from her body and began hooking up monitors so he could see how low her heart rate was. "I need help in here!" He called out loud, watching the monitors to pick up the tracings.

A nurse came running to his side, "Dr. Yang...what about everyone-"

He held his hand up as he watched the tracing, her heart rate dangerously low in the thirties. "I need 0.5 of epinephrine now...IV access...we have to get her heart rate up."

Burke moved to the top of the bed as the nurse ran to gather the drugs and placed a bag valve mask over her face, tipping her head back to open her airway to force oxygen into her lungs. "You do not get out of this that easily." He muttered at her, "I asked you a question, and you have to answer it, dammit."

Her heart rate continued to plummet just a little bit, and he began to hyperventilate the bag, "You do not get out of this!" He rose his voice, "Dammit, Cristina. Breathe. Baby, you have got to breathe..."

The nurse came back and tore open an IV package, quickly tying the tourniquet around her upper arm and pressing on her arm for a vein.

"Can't you move any faster??" He questioned her, panic taking over.

"I can't give you IV access if I don't know what I'm sticking." The nurse snapped back at him, tearing open an IV cannula and jamming the needle into her antecubitus, dark red blood trickling into the chamber and she retracted the needle, quickly jamming a J-loop onto the IV and flushing saline into it. She picked up the epinephrine, pulling the cap off of the needle with her teeth and pushed it through the IV quicker than any protocol would recommend.

She pulled the tourniquet from Cristina's arm and looked to him, "It's in...do you want to intubate?"

Burke held his breath as he watched the monitor, waiting for her heart rate to come up, waiting for the epinephrine to work it's way through her body and stimulate her heart rate to shoot up and her airways to dilate so he could get more air into her.

"Come on...Cristina, come on. Quit being so stubborn." He pled with her as he continued to squeeze the bag, her chest rising under his power.

It began slowly at first, her heart rate creeping up to the 40s, then the 50s, as it reached the mid 60's he slowed down the respirations and her eyes snapped open below him and she pushed at the mask, in a state of agitation from the isoflurane.

He knelt beside her, still squeezing the bag, "Baby, you have to calm down...there was an accident in the OR, and you need this."

She continued to fight at him, her mind still clouded from the effects of the anesthetic and the nurse grabbed the bag from him, "Calm her down."

Burke sat on the edge of the bed, grabbing her hands in his, squeezing them tight and she was powerless against his stronger grasps and he looked into her eyes, "Cristina...listen to me. You have to hold still. There was an accident in the OR and you need this oxygen...you have to calm down."

She shook her head, trying to pull her head away from the mask, becoming more agitated as she tried to fight the nurse's efforts, and he let go of her arms, grabbing at his face, and her nails found his skin, digging into his arms. Pain shot through him as she tore through his skin, but he held tighter.

"Cristina." He spoke to her in a hushed tone, looking into her terrified eyes, "You owe me an answer. I asked you a question the other day and I meant it."

Her grip loosened up on him and a tear slid from her eyes, partially from the words but from the powerlessness that she felt as well.

"I want you to stop fighting me." He continued, his voice low and silky.

He wanted her to quit fighting him. That was the understatement of the year. He wanted her to give in, to give up to her emotions. To admit that what he knew.

To say yes.

Her hands fell to her side and the nurse slowed the respirations as she began to relax and she looked to Burke, "Shall I hold respirations?"

Burke ran a hand over her cheek, "You have to breathe for me baby." He mumbled low and then nodded at the nurse to pull the bag away.

She held her breath for a second and her heart rate started to drop again, but he grabbed her hand, "Cristina...breathe."

The nurse grasped at a second vial of epinephrine and pushed it through the IV without his order and he looked at her in question, but she put the vial down, "I trust that you'll sign off on that order."

She gasped as the medication hit her circulation, searing through her veins like liquid flames and she wretched under his weight, coughing hard, then falling back to the gurney, gasping for air as the nurse put a nasal cannula on her, supplementing her already fragile lungs.

"There was an accident in the OR. An isoflurane leak, but you're going to be okay." He spoke to her quietly, gathering her hands in his. "Everybody passed out, I don't know how long you guys were in there, but you're going to be okay."

She swallowed hard, her veins still stinging from the epinephrine and she looked at him, "Is...is everyone okay?"

"You don't need to talk, you need to breathe." He shushed her, laying a finger over her lips, but she pushed it away.

"Answer me." She persisted.

He opened his mouth, but couldn't find the words to lessen the blow, to make what he had done seem less dramatic, "Shepherd told me you were in there with everybody else, Cristina and I did what I had to do."

She looked at him with question in her eyes, the color slowly returning to her cheeks as her oxygen levels came up, "What?"

"I pulled you from the OR, Cristina. Only you. Everybody else is still in there." His words were detached and empty as he came to realize what he did.

Meredith, Richard, Bailey. They could all die because he wanted to save her. Because he couldn't live without her.

He could've simply reached up and turned off the isoflurane supply and wait for it to clear out of the OR and everybody would be fine.

But in that amount of time she could have...

He pushed the thought from his head, "They're going to be fine. There's a hazmat team on the way, Cristina. They're going to be fine, and you're going to be fine and we're fine."

She grasped his hands when she saw the sadness in his eyes and came to know that when he spoke those two words to her that they weren't just empty words.

They weren't a quick fix.

Burke meant it.

A flood of people came into the recovery room, their friends and colleagues all on stretchers and she looked up to him, "Help them."

"No, there's enough-"

"I'm fine. Help them." She pushed him away, raising herself up in the bed, her ribs aching from the air being forced into her lungs.

He nodded, "Okay."

She watched quietly as he worked to get everybody else to come around and pulled herself to sit up in the gurney as she watched as one by one everybody else came around, the same medication searing through their vasculature, the same panic and agitation she'd experienced mirrored in them and she ached to be able to help them.

Things began to calm down and she sat silently as the nurse pulled the IV from her arm, watching Shepherd yell at Burke in the corner.

"Everybody could've died. All you had to do was turn off the gas! That's all you had to do and you didn't do it!"

Burke remained silent, swallowing his pride. Accepting the criticism.

"What the hell were you thinking, Preston? What the hell were you thinking just grabbing Yang? Meredith was in there, but you didn't see me running in there to play hero to my girlfriend. If you think you're going to run this hospital with that kind of bias-"

"Then I don't want to do it." He interrupted him. "I don't want to run this hospital if it means that I'm going to willingly push the woman I love aside to do it."

Meredith looked at Cristina from across the room in question then jerked her head towards the men yelling at each other and Cristina shook her head, too many thoughts running through them to process Meredith's gestures.

He left everybody there for her. He risked not only his own life, but everybody else's in that OR to save hers.

To keep her.

Burke walked away from Derek and back towards her, trying to put on a facade of anything but disappointment and hurt and he looked to her, "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay." She reassured him, her voice softer and higher than normal. "Can we go home?"

He smiled just a little, "Yeah...we can." He rose from the gurney and held his hand out to help her up and wrapped an arm around her waist as she steadied herself, "The epinephrine is going to make you a little wobbly."

"Tell me about it." She mumbled, leaning herself against him weakly, then stepping forward. "Okay...I'm okay."

The walked from the recovery room, her body pressed against his partly for strength and partly because she knew now that she could never let him go.

He'd risked his life for her.

The ride home was silent, her fingers interlocked tightly with his her heart and chest aching as she struggled with her conscience and her heart over what she could say to him, how she could thank him.

How she could show him the same love and dedication that he had shown her.

He helped her up the stairs to the apartment and opened the door, letting her in first and he brushed past her as she slowly made her way towards the bedroom, "I'm going to go change."

"Do you want some hot tea or coffee? It'll make the ache go away." He offered, pulling a coffee filter from the cabinet, already knowing she'd want coffee.

"Coffee." She called to him as she pulled her scrubs from her sore body and slid into a pair of his pajama pants and a tank top and looked at the box on the nightstand.

The box that carried all of his hopes and dreams for their future.

Her solution was so clear, and suddenly she wasn't so afraid of the answer that she knew she had to give him.

His love for her was bigger than a ring or a commitment, or a marriage license. It was bigger than some sort of quick fix phrase that was going to heal deep wounds.

She grabbed the ring from the box and slid it down her finger into place and made her way into the kitchen where he stood by the counter quietly examining the scratches in his forearm and furrowed her brow in question.

"It's nothing." He assured her and said no more.

She ran her fingers over the wounds and looked at him, a pained expression on her face, "I did this?"

Burke opened his mouth to answer her as she studied the damage that she'd cause to his arms in a state of confusion brought about by the anesthesia, but he was caught off guard by the glimmering ring on her finger. He swallowed hard, looking to her, "Are you saying yes?"

She raised her eyebrows, his words catching her off guard and met his gaze, "You...saved me. Every time that I'm in trouble, every time that I need to be saved, you save me. You put everything on the line for me. It's my turn."

"All you had to say was yes." He pulled her close, kissing the top of her head.

"Whatever."

He tilted her chin up and bent his head down to her so that their lips were only millimeters apart and he whispered to her in a hushed tone, "Thank you."

"Burke?" She mumbled, her gaze locked with his, their lips agonizingly close to meeting.

"Yeah?" His hand ran up her shoulder softly to the back of her neck.

"Yes." Cristina uttered at him and caught his lips with hers, softly, pulling herself against him. The kiss deepened and he wrapped his arms around her and she let go of the fear, feeling safe in his arms, his love wrapping around her with his embrace.

In that moment, they both knew that they had made the right decisions, and nothing would ever change that.


End file.
